I love WLED and have used it on over a dozen lighting projects with ESP32s and ESP8266s. It makes it so ridiculously easy, and has an incredible set of features with a great app to control it all and integrate with other services.
- Kids bedside lamps. Using the timed preset changes in WLED it goes from bright white/blue for reading time, then at bedtime it plays a rainbow animation and fades to a bright orange with pulses of similar colours, then throughout the next hour fades to a gentle animation of soft colours that stay on all night as their nightlights.
- Down-lighting on shelving, using strips of LEDs under each shelf lip. Gives a nice bright warm-white glow to everything on the shelves which shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting in the room.
- Ambient lighting throughout various rooms that is controlled via Home Assistant.
- LED strips on my 3D printers which are turned on via Octoprint when the printers start warming up, and stay on throughout the prints for timelapses then the lights all go green when the prints are finished.
... and many more. Every single one of those projects were simple 1-day affairs thanks to WLED. Stick the LEDs where you want them, wire them up to an ESP + a PSU (usually an old phone charger with a chopped USB cable to split out power), and flash the ESP and boot. Then the rest is done sitting down with your phone and playing with the sequence editor or choosing presets/timers.
Can you link to what bedside lamp you're using? I'm happy to modify/retrofit an existing lamp but have yet to find something that would work well with LED strips.
If it doesn't have to be too bright you can use many lamps by wrapping a LED strip around a tube and placing that roughly where a bulb would go. Lanterns can also look cool that way if they have frosted sides.
I'm a huge fan of WLED. It tends to work flawlessly after some minor tweaking of settings, at least on my ESP8266 board with WS2815 LED strips. The built-in effects are likely sufficient for most uses and can easily be programmatically controlled by something like Home Assistant [1].
If you consider building a setup, I would only recommend ensuring your wiring is correct and the power supplies are sufficient for the LEDs you're using, unless the board's built-in power output (probably with a level shifter to 5V) is enough.
- I wanted a semi-permanent lighting fixture for Christmas, but something that would work for other holidays as well. I took a bunch of bullet-style leds and inserted them into holes I drilled on a piece of material that matched the gutters. Mounted them just underneath the gutter, you don't even see them unless you're looking for them. "Hanging" my xmas lights outdoors means I hit one IOT button that turns on the power supply, then I can navigate to the private IP attached to the strand. The interface is easy enough that the kids/missus change the lights whenever they feel like it.
- Two years in a row now for Halloween, I used WLED for my pumpkin carving. Carve out the inside, then drill evenly-spaced holes around the pumpkin and insert the same bullet-style LEDs into each hole facing the outside. Wifi-enabled pumpkin. The neighborhood kids call us "the house with the UFO pumpkin that gives out full-sized candybars".
Does anyone know of a compatible ESP32 development board with a built-in microphone and frequency analyser e.g. an MSGEQ7 (for sound-reactive projects)?
WLED: Open-Source, software only you can flash on various boards. Doesn't have the scripting/live-coding part that Pixelblaze has (i.e. you need to write your own effects in c++ and compile them in). Doesn't support 2D/3D mappings natively. Has a few more APIs.
Pixelblaze is really nice and in many ways the more advanced option, but for most things I go for a <$5 board with WLED or FastLED over $35 (+shipping +tax) for a PixelBlaze.
The biggest differentiator is that Pixelblaze is built around the user being able to define their own patterns, while WLED is more built around getting a turn-key setup as easily as possible. One of the downsides to the Pixelblaze, for me, has been in instances where I just want a simple thing like a specific color, or a simple fade or pattern. While you can do that on the Pixelblaze it can take more time to tweak the PB code vs. just moving a couple of sliders in the WLED interface.
WLED has many really cool advanced features like support for segmentation of one led strip into multiple ones, Synchronization with other instances, Alexa/Google Home support, Phillips Hue Emulation, HTTP API, Controlable over DMX with E1.31 or ArtNet.
There exists even a sound reactive fork. Which analyzes(volume and FFT based) the audio directly on the ESP32.
- Kids bedside lamps. Using the timed preset changes in WLED it goes from bright white/blue for reading time, then at bedtime it plays a rainbow animation and fades to a bright orange with pulses of similar colours, then throughout the next hour fades to a gentle animation of soft colours that stay on all night as their nightlights.
- Down-lighting on shelving, using strips of LEDs under each shelf lip. Gives a nice bright warm-white glow to everything on the shelves which shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting in the room.
- Ambient lighting throughout various rooms that is controlled via Home Assistant.
- LED strips on my 3D printers which are turned on via Octoprint when the printers start warming up, and stay on throughout the prints for timelapses then the lights all go green when the prints are finished.
... and many more. Every single one of those projects were simple 1-day affairs thanks to WLED. Stick the LEDs where you want them, wire them up to an ESP + a PSU (usually an old phone charger with a chopped USB cable to split out power), and flash the ESP and boot. Then the rest is done sitting down with your phone and playing with the sequence editor or choosing presets/timers.